Leaky Locks
What Counts as Information? In 1943, the telephone in Winston Churchill’s war room was a problem. The transatlantic calls to Roosevelt were encrypted by a system called SIGSAL... The Prophet Filter
The Email That Knew Tomorrow You receive an email from someone you’ve never heard of. The subject line: “The market will close up tomorrow.” You ignore it. But the next day, y... Why Dividing Two Random Numbers Reveals π
Where more data doesn’t mean more certainty Take two random numbers and divide them. Do it again. And again. Now average the results. Does the number settle down? No matter h... The Map Always Knows… Or Does It?
From Roads to Routes It begins with a puzzle you may have tried as a child: can you draw a figure in one continuous stroke without lifting your pen, and without retracing any l... Global Warming and Diversity Cooling
The Same Collapse, Twice Here is a strange fact: the mathematics of a cooling gas and the mathematics of a dying ecosystem are identical. When a gas cools, its molecules slow ... De Méré's Dice Paradox
When $1+1$ Is Not $2$ In seventeenth century France, Antoine Gombaud, better known as Chevalier de Méré, was a man of letters, a gambler, and a self-styled authority on matters... How Long Until the Bus?
Catch It If You Can You arrive at the stop. The sign promised a bus every $10$ minutes. Your watch says you should be fine. But the street is empty. $5$ minutes. $7$ minutes. A... Pushforwards and Pullbacks
The Die and the Question Roll a die. You get a 4. Now I ask: “Is it even?” Something just happened that’s easy to miss. The randomness moved. It started in a space of six fac... Frequentist Slices, Bayesian Shadows
Marginal vs. Conditional Predictions The central difference between frequentist and Bayesian statistics is how they treat the unknown. In the frequentist view, parameters are f...